Aphra Behn’s The Rover: Feminine Desire, Economics, and the Legacy of Women’s Voice

Introduction:

Aphra Behn (1640–1689), one of the earliest professional female playwrights in English literature, stands as a daring voice in the Restoration period—a time when theatrical culture re-emerged after the Puritan ban and when women first appeared as actresses and playwrights.

Her play The Rover (1677) is a Restoration comedy that combines wit, erotic intrigue, and social commentary, exploring themes of love, liberty, gender politics, and economic power. In an age dominated by male dramatists like Wycherley, Etherege, and Congreve, Behn’s The Rover offered a distinctively feminine lens through which to examine male privilege, sexual hypocrisy, and the commodification of women’s bodies.

Two crucial aspects of The Rover invite deep critical reflection: first, the conflation between marriage and prostitution, and second, Behn’s pioneering role as a feminist foremother, celebrated by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. This blog examines both questions in light of Behn’s text, critical feminist thought, and Restoration cultural norms.

A short introductory video:

---

1. Angellica Bianca and the Economics of Desire:

1.1 The Context of Marriage and Prostitution in the Restoration Age:

In Restoration England, the marriage market functioned as an institution of social and financial transaction. Marriages among the upper and middle classes were seldom rooted in affection; instead, they were arranged based on wealth, dowries, and social alliances. Women were often viewed as economic assets whose marital value depended on their chastity and family status. Within this framework, female virtue was commodified, and a woman’s body—whether within the confines of marriage or outside it—became a site of economic exchange.

Aphra Behn exposes this hypocrisy through The Rover, a play set in Naples during Carnival, where social hierarchies are blurred and desires are unmasked. The courtesan Angellica Bianca operates openly as a prostitute, but unlike the “virtuous” women of polite society, she is transparent about the economic dimension of her sexuality.

---

1.2 Angellica’s Voice and Moral Irony:

Angellica Bianca’s character is complex—she is not a mere figure of lust but a woman of agency, intellect, and emotional vulnerability. She understands her worth, both materially and emotionally. In Act II, Scene I, she declares her price through her portrait and her servants, selling her company to the highest bidder. Yet, her transaction is not unlike that of many Restoration marriages, which were essentially financial negotiations disguised as romance.

When Angellica confronts Willmore, she articulates a scathing critique of patriarchal double standards. After being seduced and abandoned by him, she cries out:

“How many vows he made to me, how many sighs and amorous words he wasted, how many soft expressions of love, how many vows of constancy—Oh perjured man!”

Her anguish is not only personal but ideological. Behn uses Angellica’s voice to reveal how women—be they courtesans or wives—are exploited under a system that rewards male promiscuity and punishes female sexual freedom.

---

1.3 The Paradox of the Marriage Market:

Angellica’s view that marriage is not morally different from prostitution finds echoes in contemporary feminist criticism. In the Restoration period, wives were legally their husbands’ property. Their sexual and economic autonomy was subsumed under marital law. As literary critic Janet Todd notes:

“Behn recognized that marriage, far from being the antithesis of prostitution, could be its legal form.”   

(Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn, 1996)

Angellica is, therefore, not mistaken when she equates the two. Both marriage and prostitution are economic exchanges for male pleasure and female survival—one socially sanctioned, the other stigmatized. In a patriarchal society that commodifies female bodies, Angellica’s profession only makes explicit what polite society prefers to disguise.

---

1.4 Behn’s Economic Feminism:

Behn’s portrayal of Angellica exposes a proto-feminist economic awareness. Angellica is not ashamed of her financial dealings; instead, she claims agency through them. Her self-awareness destabilizes the moral binary between the “virgin” and the “whore.” Unlike the virginal Hellena or Florinda, Angellica controls her economic destiny—until love undermines her power.

Critic Jane Spencer argues that Behn’s courtesans often mirror the economic constraints of all women:

“Behn’s prostitutes express the frustration of all women who must sell their chastity, in one way or another, to survive.” 

(Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 1986)

Thus, Angellica’s tragedy lies in her realization that emotional love, in a capitalist-patriarchal world, cannot coexist with autonomy. Her seduction by Willmore—the quintessential libertine—represents how emotional dependency can dismantle economic self-possession.

---

1.5 Do We Agree with Angellica?

Yes—within the historical and socio-economic framework of Behn’s time, Angellica’s comparison between marriage and prostitution holds profound truth. Behn exposes the patriarchal hypocrisy of men who condemn prostitutes while treating marriage as a financial transaction. Through Angellica, Behn articulates a timeless critique of gendered economics—a theme still resonant in modern feminist thought.

---

2. Aphra Behn and the Feminine Right to Speak: Woolf’s Tribute:

2.1 Virginia Woolf’s Homage:

In her landmark essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf famously wrote:

“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

This declaration transforms Behn from a Restoration playwright into a symbolic ancestor of women’s authorship. Woolf saw Behn as a woman who defied social norms by earning her living through writing—thus paving the way for future generations of women to articulate their intellect and creativity publicly.

---

2.2 The Historical Context: Writing as a Woman:

In the 17th century, women were largely excluded from public professions. Intellectual and artistic production was dominated by men, and a woman who wrote professionally was often branded immoral or unchaste. Behn broke this taboo, not only writing but earning from her work—a radical act in an era when women’s labor was confined to the domestic sphere.

Aphra Behn’s literary career represents both resistance and survival. She wrote for a living because she needed to, yet in doing so, she legitimized women’s intellectual labor. Her career anticipated Woolf’s argument that for a woman to write, she must have “a room of her own and five hundred a year.”

---

2.3 Behn’s Feminist Vision in The Rover:

Behn’s The Rover is not a conventional comedy of manners. It subverts Restoration gender norms through its female characters’ wit, assertiveness, and sexual agency. Hellena, for instance, refuses to submit to the passive role expected of her as a prospective nun. She pursues Willmore with audacity and humor, asserting:

“I’ll provide myself this Carnival, if there be e’er a handsome proper fellow of my humour above ground.”

Hellena’s line transforms her from object to subject of desire. She chooses, flirts, and decides—a radical inversion of patriarchal conventions. Similarly, Florinda, though initially framed as a romantic heroine, defends her sexual integrity against repeated assaults, dramatizing the precarious balance between freedom and vulnerability that women faced.

Through these women, Behn gives voice to what Woolf later termed “the female sentence”—the articulation of women’s thought, desire, and autonomy in a world structured by male discourse.

---

2.4 The Rover and the Politics of the Female Body:

The play also dramatizes the violence and instability of female existence in a male-dominated society. The attempted rapes of Florinda by both Blunt and Willmore expose the brutality underlying libertine “freedom.” Behn refuses to idealize romantic love; she portrays it as a power struggle between desire and domination.

Critic Susan Staves interprets this dynamic as Behn’s way of indicting patriarchal sexual politics:

“Behn’s comedies reveal how the libertine’s pleasure depends on the suppression of female will.” 

(Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration, 1979)

By giving her female characters speech, defiance, and moral complexity, Behn challenges the Restoration comedy’s male-centered discourse. Thus, Woolf’s tribute recognizes that Behn not only wrote as a woman but also rewrote the language of female representation.

---

2.5 Aphra Behn as Proto-Feminist Icon:

Behn’s feminism is not modern in its form—it does not explicitly advocate for suffrage or equal rights—but it is revolutionary in its assertion of female subjectivity. Her women think, desire, and act independently. They resist commodification, challenge male hypocrisy, and speak their truth. In doing so, Behn envisioned a literary and moral space for female agency.

Elaine Hobby, in her feminist analysis of Behn, notes:

“Behn’s importance lies not only in being the first professional woman writer, but in writing about women as thinking, feeling individuals.”

(Hobby, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, 1999)

This intellectual courage is precisely what Woolf celebrates. Behn’s pen became a weapon against silence, enabling later writers—Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, and Woolf herself—to continue the tradition of women’s intellectual self-expression.

---

2.6 Do We Agree with Woolf?

Yes—Woolf’s statement is both historically and symbolically justified. Aphra Behn earned women the right to speak not merely by her success but by her defiance of gendered limitations. In a time when female voices were dismissed or punished, Behn’s public authorship broke the silence of centuries. Her career demonstrated that a woman could be both intellectual and independent, both erotic and articulate.

Her tomb in Westminster Abbey bears the epitaph:

“Here lies a proof that wit can never be
Defence enough against mortality.”

Ironically, her “wit” outlived mortality—it became immortal through the lineage of women who followed her. Woolf’s metaphorical flowers are tributes not only to Behn’s genius but to her courage—the courage to claim authorship, to speak desire, and to expose social hypocrisy.

---

Conclusion:

Aphra Behn’s The Rover remains one of the most provocative and enduring works of Restoration drama because it exposes the intersection of gender, economics, and power with remarkable wit and emotional depth. Through Angellica Bianca, Behn dismantles the illusion that marriage is a sacred institution free of financial motives, revealing it instead as a regulated form of prostitution within patriarchal capitalism. Her female characters—Angellica, Hellena, and Florinda—each challenge the commodification of women in distinct ways, making the play an early manifesto of women’s self-awareness.

Equally, Behn’s authorship itself embodies the feminist revolution that Virginia Woolf would later articulate. She was the first English woman to earn her living through writing, thereby granting women the professional and intellectual space to speak their minds. The Rover is more than a comedy; it is a subversive act of female authorship, a declaration of independence from social and literary patriarchy.

To agree with both Angellica and Woolf is to recognize Behn’s dual legacy: her economic realism that equates love with transaction, and her artistic audacity that transforms speech into liberation. Her work continues to resonate because it articulates, with humor and pathos, the eternal struggle for women’s agency—over body, over voice, and over destiny.

---

References:

• Behn, Aphra. The Rover; or, The Banish’d Cavaliers. Edited by Jane Spencer, Oxford University Press, 1995.

• Hobby, Elaine. Aphra Behn’s The Rover. Routledge, 1999.

• Spencer, Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Basil Blackwell, 1986.

• Staves, Susan. Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration. University of Nebraska Press, 1979.

• Todd, Janet. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. Rutgers University Press, 1996.

• Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Harcourt, 1929.

• Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820. University of California Press, 1994.

• Hughes, Derek. The Theatre of Aphra Behn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

• Pearson, Jacqueline. The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists, 1642–1737. Harvester Press, 1988.

• Rosenthal, Laura J. Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. Cornell University Press, 2006.
  
  THANK YOU !